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All free summaries — page 511
47,382 public-domain books, summarised. Page 511 of 988.
The Dominant Strain
Anna Chapin Ray
High society and artistic ambition collide when a refined woman marries a charming man to save him, only to face the limits of her influence.
The Escorial: A Historical and Descriptive Account of the Spanish Royal Palace, Monastery and Mausoleum
Albert Frederick Calvert
An austere gridiron of granite rises against the Castilian mountains, built to align a king's religious devotion with the absolute power of his empire.
The evolution of religion
Lewis Richard Farnell
A comparative examination of ancient rites reveals how primitive taboos and magical spells slowly evolved into refined moral codes and spiritual communion.
The flame-gatherers
Margaret Horton Potter
A soul cursed by passion and betrayal seeks redemption across the span of centuries and reincarnations in medieval India.
The House of the Wolf: A Romance
Stanley John Weyman
A high-spirited teenage nobleman leads his brothers into the madness of 1572 Paris, risking everything to rescue their cousin's Protestant lover from the deadly clutches of an implacable rival.
The Indian Drum
William MacHarg
Across the stormy, ice-bound waters of Lake Michigan, an unseen drum marks every life lost to the waves, keeping count of a dark tally that one ambitious man will do anything to hide.
The Iron Woman
Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
Youth, passion, and stubborn pride collide in a industrial river town where four childhood friends discover how easily a single hasty decision can shatter multiple lives.
The Italian, Volume 1 (of 3)
Ann Ward Radcliffe
A sinister monk stalks a noble Neapolitan youth to thwart his passion for an orphaned noblewoman.
The King of Arcadia
Francis Lynde
A remote Colorado valley becomes a deadly battleground when an ambitious irrigation project collides with an unyielding cattle baron's private wilderness kingdom.
The Knickerbocker, Vol. 10, No. 6, December 1837
Various
This 1837 issue captures the burgeoning literary spirit of nineteenth-century America through a rich mixture of travelogues, historical speculation, moral fiction, and social criticism.
The Last Miracle
M. P. (Matthew Phipps) Shiel
Forged miracles, stolen clerics, and a grand, ruthless conspiracy collide in a twilight Europe where a dying faith is systematically dismantled by a single terrifying will.
The Lucky Seventh
Ralph Henry Barbour
A makeshift ball club, a stubborn town patriarch, and a crippling injury conspire against a high school baseball team fighting to keep its home field.
The Making of Species
Douglas Dewar
A rigorous critique of post-Darwinian evolutionary theories that challenges rigid dogmas while offering a fresh, empirical vision of species formation.
The Man from Mars: His Morals, Politics and Religion
William Simpson
A recluse observing nature through a telescope meets a Martian visitor who reveals how an advanced society solved Earth's worst systemic failures.
The Marx He Knew
John Spargo
A reverent old cigarmaker passes down the unwritten history of socialism's foundational theorist through the intimate memories of a lifelong friendship.
The missing chums
Franklin W. Dixon
When a summer boat trip turns into a abduction, two teenage brothers race to rescue their lost friends from a ruthless gang hiding on a desolate island.
The National Geographic Magazine, Vol. I., No. 2, April, 1889
Various
A grand survey of physical landmasses, oceanic depth, and global atmosphere unfolds alongside the formal administrative birth of a newly organized scientific institution.
The National Geographic Magazine, Vol. II., No. 5, April, 1891
Various
A young scientific institution charts its administrative growth while venturing beyond the lecture hall into bold Alaskan field exploration.
The Nursery, Volume 17, No. 101, May, 1875: A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers
Various
Gentle morality tales, playful nature lessons, and domestic vignettes capture the quiet rhythms and earnest values of late nineteenth-century childhood.
The Pension Beaurepas
Henry James
An observant American student takes lodging in Geneva, where two expatriate families quietly unravel over money, culture, and the freedom to go home.
The Reflections of Ambrosine: A Novel
Elinor Glyn
A high-born young woman trades her freedom for her family’s survival, only to discover that the aristocratic world she sacrificed herself to enter is governed by its own ruthless code.
The Rise and Fall of Anarchy in America: From its Incipient Stage to the First Bomb Thrown in Chicago
George N. McLean
A city gripped by economic strife becomes a powder keg when radical labor rhetoric meets the unyielding authority of the law.
The Scott Country
John Geddie
A journey through the Scottish Borders reveals how physical terrain, regional history, and poetic imagination interweave to create a landscape permanently shaped by Sir Walter Scott.
The Shagganappi
E. Pauline Johnson
Across these stories of the Canadian frontier, young hands hold canoes against furious rapids, skin frostbitten ankles on the trail, and balance the weight of ancestral honor against a rapidly encroaching white world.
The Two Dianas, Volume 3 (of 3)
Paul Meurice
A man of noble character finds his life’s purpose consumed by a vendetta against the monarchy that destroyed his world. This final installment traces his path from private justice to the bloody theater of civil war.
Thirty Years in Australia
Ada Cambridge
A quiet domestic intimacy illuminates this thirty-year journey across a rapidly changing young nation.
Three Boys in the Wild North Land
Egerton Ryerson Young
A guest in a northern wilderness home finds himself drawn into an endless sequence of wild chases, bitter cold, and the sudden, fierce beauty of the subarctic edge.
Three little maids
Ethel Turner
Three sisters leave their native England for Australia, turning early family struggles into imaginative play and eventual literary ambitions.
Through the Iron Bars: Two Years of German Occupation in Belgium
Emile Cammaerts
A nation stripped of its territory, its flags, and its native industry refuses to surrender its spirit to a military occupier.
Turkey and the Armenian atrocities
Edwin Munsell Bliss
A geography of landscape and belief yields to a meticulous record of terror, political inertia, and targeted human destruction.
U.S. Marines In Vietnam, Volume 1 (of 9)
Robert H. Whitlow
Before heavy combat units arrived, a small contingent of American advisors and helicopter crews quietly built the foundation of the Marine presence in Southeast Asia.
Uncle Wiggily's Fortune
Howard Roger Garis
A gentle old rabbit with a cornstalk crutch roams the woods and beaches searching for a elusive fortune, meeting helpful friends and hungry predators along the way.
Under the Shadow of Etna: Sicilian Stories from the Italian of Giovanni Verga
Giovanni Verga
On the scorched, malarial plains of nineteenth-century Sicily, passions cut as deep as the poverty that feeds them, bound only by brute force, pride, and the unrelenting struggle to survive.
Under Three Flags: A Story of Mystery
Bert Leston Taylor
A small-town murder launches a globe-trotting chase, pulling a restless reporter and an ambitious detective into the dangerous currents of the Cuban War of Independence.
Ungava
R. M. (Robert Michael) Ballantyne
To plant a trading post on the frozen shores of Hudson's Bay, men must fight snowstorms, starvation, and endless inter-tribal warfare. This is an earnest nineteenth-century arctic adventure where human warmth holds back the barren wilderness.
Up in Maine: Stories of Yankee Life Told in Verse
Holman Day
Bare-knuckled humor, rustic ironies, and timber-town tragedies converge in a spirited poetic portrait of turn-of-the-century rural New England.
War paint
Robert Winchester
She came to the Texas border in a high-powered roadster with her lipstick drawn for war, never expecting two laconic Rangers to turn her city-bred world upside down.
With Lee in Virginia: A Story of the American Civil War
G. A. (George Alfred) Henty
In the crucible of the American Civil War, a young Virginian finds that fighting for his home demands courage not only on the battlefield, but against the deep injustices within his own society.
A Book of Christian Sonnets
William Allen
An aged scholar gazes through his sickroom window at the cold winter sky, turning his remaining hours into rigorous, Fourteen-line meditations on divine truth, scripture, and the fleeting beauty of a physical world he expects soon to leave behind.
A Boy of Old Japan
R. (Robert) Van Bergen
A young samurai comes of age amidst the quiet traditions of feudal Japan, only to be cast into the whirlwind of a nation forcibly tearing itself open to the modern world.
A Brief History of Printing in England: A Short History of Printing in England from Caxton to the Present Time
Frederick W. (Frederick William) Hamilton
An industrial trade craft is shaped through four centuries of state censorship, commercial rivalry, and mechanical reinvention across the English landscape.
A Danish Parsonage
John Fulford Vicary
An open-hearted English sportsman travels to the quiet streams and ancient beech groves of Jutland, where a country parson’s local lore and a daughter’s clear voice gradually remake his view of home.
A Gift For Terra
Fox B. Holden
A lone survivor on a dead world accepts a miraculous offer of salvation, unaware that the ultimate price will be paid by his home planet.
A Letter to American Workingmen, from the Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia
Vladimir Il'ich Lenin
A revolutionary message sent across the globe calls upon laboring people to join an international struggle against capitalist exploitation and imperialist war.
A Nine Days' Wonder
B. M. (Bithia Mary) Croker
A hidden identity and a forgotten heritage reshape a young life when an Irish country girl is revealed to be the lost daughter of a British peer.
After Long Years and Other Stories
Sophie Antoinette Miller
A young man collapses in a Russian snowstorm; an apprentice carver faces an impossible challenge to win his love; an orphaned infant floats downstream past crushing ice-floes.
Among the Tibetans
Isabella L. (Isabella Lucy) Bird
Across the high Himalayan passes, where rivers freeze beneath blue ice and wind hollows the rock, a nineteenth-century Victorian woman journeys on horseback into the solitary, cloud-lifted kingdom of Lesser Tibet.
Ancient Rome in the English novel: a study in English historical fiction
Randolph Faries
Scholarly rigor and artistic imagination converge to determine how the ancient Roman world is reconstructed within the boundaries of modern prose fiction.